### Boss-free since 1996.

We believe that the best product decisions are made by the people who are actually doing the work. We take great pride in hiring top talent from a variety of disciplines and bringing people together with one simple directive: Collaborate and create. Below are some of the people at Valve who do just that.

## Art

Aaron Barber

Aaron got his first taste of creating 3D environments while he was studying engineering at UCLA. He was building VRML websites for the university, and also started designing levels for several internet mods. His level design skills landed him a job at Xatrix Entertainment where he worked on Redneck Rampage, Quake 2, and Kingpin before joining Valve in 1999 to work on Half-Life 2.

Contact
Ariel Diaz

Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Ariel came to Valve after finishing his studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design. As part of Valve's character design team, he is responsible for creating character models, facial expressions, and skeleton deformations. Outside Valve, he pursues traditional art skills such as drawing, painting, and sculpting.

Brad Kinley

Full-time bellowing sasquatch and animator. Brad came to Valve after working for ILM, Bioware and Capcom. He thought animating Optimus Prime on top of a t-rex would be the peak of his own particular sizzle mountain, but the mountain has continued to sizzle here at Valve. Sizzling mountain animation action.

Bram Eulaers

Growing up in Belgium, Bram got hooked on game development making levels for Duke Nukem 3D and Half-life at a young age. After getting a start in the games industry working at various companies in the Netherlands and Sweden, he moved to the United States to help create Overwatch at Blizzard Entertainment. With his roots in the modding community, he now feels at home at Valve, where he spends most of his time obsessing over efficient UV layouts.

Chris Welch

Chris received his Bachelor's of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Animation and Medical Illustration. After working in the Biomedical field for several years as a 3d artist and traditional illustrator, he went on to work in the film industry as a Look/Dev and Texture Artist, working on films such as Avatar. He has now been at Valve as an artist since 2010 working on all things art related, from character design and environment concepting, to video game trailer production.

Contact
Dan Rosas Paulsen

Dan comes from busy Mexico City. Back there he was lead artist for Kerbal Space Program. Before joining Valve he completed a Master's in 3D Animation at the National Centre for Computer Animation in the UK. On his spare time he enjoys composing music and working on his own experimental projects, while getting used to rainy Seattle.

Eric Kirchmer

At the age of 6, after a chance encounter with the artist Phil Tippett, Eric had the opportunity to view many of the original models following the release of Return of the Jedi, which set him on course to coloring, building, drawing, and creating with any and all materials in his path. If only his younger self would have ever known what would someday follow as a career. In the years as an artist with Valve, Eric has contributed to the visual design of games including Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Dota 2 and other Valve titles.

Contact
Irving Zhang

Irving is an effects artist at Valve. His passion is crafting incredible and memorable gaming experiences for players. His favorite Dota hero is Brewmaster. When he's not in front of a computer, he loves fitness, tennis, and travel.

Jason Brashill

Jason worked on British comics 2000ad and Judge Dredd Megazine as well as concept art for many games. His free time was spent mostly âenhancingâ (other people’s) property with spray paint. Jason eventually skipped town and now resides near Seattle where he does all manner of arting at Valve and no longer pursues his extra-curricular activities in any way shape or form. Honest.

Matt Charlesworth

Matt is and Artist and Designer from the UK city of Nottingham. After spending the first 10 years of his career working at studios in the UK and Canada, Matt joined Valve in 2008. He got straight to work crafting character art and for Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, Dota 2 and The Lab and has most recently shipped Half-Life: Alyx.

Max Aristov

Since Max's first computer Iskra-1030 he has been on a mission to only use the latest and greatest computers and software which lead him to working on videogames at GSC Gameworld, Action Forms, Crytek, Raven Software and finally Valve. He works on characters and environments

Contact
Nick Bizzozero

Nick is a 3D generalist at Valve. You may know him from his work on the Risk of Rain series. He has spent most of his life breaking other peoples games and trying to convince his bosses to let people break his.

Thiago Vidotto

Thiago received his Bachelor's of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Sao Paulo - Brazil.He has a passion for learning and started his videogame journey modding Quake back in the 90s. At Valve, he has been working in many different roles like Modeling, Animation, and VFX.In his personal life, he enjoys bladesmithing, racing motorcycles, and transforming his house into a jungle.

Contact View Steam Profile
Tristan Reidford

Tristan earned a degree in transportation design. After a dipping a toe into industrial design, he found his way into making models for games, eventually landing at Valve to help with Half Life 2, Episode 2. Since then He's been delighted to get away with building all sorts of models and art for Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Team fortress 2, among others. Outside of Valve, Tristan enjoys the decision paralysis that comes from making art and models in the real world where there is no Ctrl Z.

Contact
Wade Schin

Wade has worked in the game industry as an artist since 1998, and for Valve since 2005. In his spare time, he participates in group art shows and experiments with 3d printing and casting.

Contact

## Audio

Ethan Geller

Ethan Geller mostly works on audio, music and software. He can occasionally be found playing middling jazz-rock at small venues in Seattle.

Contact
Mike Morasky

Morasky's life and career sounds a lot like one of the post-modern audio collages he is so fond of creating. Teenage guitar player in a bar band in Montana; award-winning experimental composer in Tokyo; audio hardware programmer in Silicon Valley; underground art rocker touring the world; 3D animator and director for television; electronic audio collage artist in France and Japan; visual fx artist on The Lord of the Rings and Matrix trilogies; AI animation instructor at an art college. These days, Mike is doing some combination of all these things at Valve.

Contact
Nathaniel Blue

Nathaniel Blue works on The Steam Team and Audio at Valve. He spends most of his time working on Steam features, new business opportunities, and music. He has a variety of experience in the gaming industry, advertising, and the music industry.

Ryan Done

Ryan Done is a software engineer who works on systems for game audio production and audio processing. He's always looking for an occasion to ride bikes.

Tim Larkin

As a freelance composer and musician, Tim has done it all. He played trumpet for the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Sheila E., Lou Rawls, Huey Lewis, James Brown, and Natalie Cole; recorded numerous records, movies, documentaries, and TV shows (including Survivor and Fear Factor 2.0) as a studio musician; created the sound design for The Chubbchubbs!, a 2003 Academy Award winner for Best Animated Short Film; and as Audio Director at Cyan studio for eight years, created the music and sound for the Myst series. Now, he's here at Valve, where he's worked on just about every title the company has shipped. When he's not working, Tim is playing tennis, fly fishing, or commuting back and forth to his home and family in Spokane, WA.

Tobin Buttram

As a music major, Tobin looked forward to a career in food service. Instead, he spent most of his twenties touring and recording with Robert Fripp and The League of Crafty Guitarists, which led, somehow inevitably, to Microsoft in 1996, where he worked on Interactive Music Architecture (DirectMusic) and as an Audio Director at Microsoft Game Studios, primarily with FASA. Tobin joined Valve in 2008 and is blown away every day that, in addition to doing audio production on some of the coolest projects in the whole wide world, he's allowed to tinker with the audio calls in the game code, and encouraged to learn more about that side of the process every day.

## Business Development

Adam Klaff

Adam joined Valve in 2015. He works on the Steam business team. Prior to that, he ran business development for a video startup in Brooklyn, and before that he worked in production on several movies, plays and television projects.

Connor Malone

Connor joined Valve in 2009 as part of the Support Team. After a few years he joined the Steam Business team to help third-party developers and coordinate promotions.

Contact
DJ Powers

The bulk of my childhood and young adult life revolved around working to become a better golfer. After a mostly unsuccessful playing career, I spent a few years coaching collegiate golf teams and then transitioned indoors to work on the Tiger Woods PGA Tour games at Electronic Arts. During my time at EA, I worked in the EA Partners Group where we helped Valve ship The Orange Box, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2 on console and into retail. I started at Valve in 2010, working as a member of the Business Development Team and focusing on Steam, Partner relationships, Hardware and VR among many other things. Mostly unsuccessful is still a good description of my golf game.

Nathaniel Blue

Nathaniel Blue works on The Steam Team and Audio at Valve. He spends most of his time working on Steam features, new business opportunities, and music. He has a variety of experience in the gaming industry, advertising, and the music industry.

Ria Hu

Doing a little bit of everything, everywhere, all at once.

Shreya Liu

Shreya graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign but got working on strategic business partnerships for Surface while at Microsoft. She used to dream about lightsabers but now she's working on making them a [virtual] reality.

Tom Giardino

Tom is a graduate of the University of Washington Foster School of Business and a former high school teacher. He has worked at Valve since 2012. Tom spends his days on the Steam Business team. One part of that work is making Steam a better platform for customers to buy and play games. The other part is helping game developers make the most of Steam's tools, features, and opportunities.

Contact

## Customer Support

David Underwood

David spent seven years in higher education before joining Valve in 2014 to work with Steam Support. His focus is on quality, partner management, and project management. If you need assistance with your Steam account, please create a help request at https://help.steampowered.com.

Contact
Jared Christen

Jared has worked with Steam Support since 2010 and is currently focused on expanding and refining the support operation. If you have feedback for Steam Support or from an interaction that you've had with the team, send it my way using my contact link below.

Contact
Patricia Zavalza

After working in manufacturing for almost a decade focusing on Program and Account Management, Patricia joined the Customer Support team at Valve where she is working on improving the quality of our interactions with our users and partners.

## Data Science

John McDonald

John writes high performance code and oversees gradient descents. Prior to joining Valve, he worked at NVIDIA where he developed new techniques to drive GPUs and helped numerous developers optimize their game engines. John got his start in the game industry working on Command & Conquer: Generals.

Contact
Kristian Miller

Kristian studied Economics and Finance at Montana State University before arriving at Valve in 2012. He started on Team Fortress 2, where he worked to better understand player interactions with crates, name tags, and Hats of Undeniable Wealth and Respect. Kristian currently works with the Steam team, where he focuses on platform growth, virtual reality, and development of partners' in-game economies.

Contact
Matt Rhoten

Software nerd who's a little interested in everything else too.

View Steam Profile

## Game Design

Alexander Mark

Prior to joining Valve, Alex animated in Film and FX for a decade.

Ariel Diaz

Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Ariel came to Valve after finishing his studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design. As part of Valve's character design team, he is responsible for creating character models, facial expressions, and skeleton deformations. Outside Valve, he pursues traditional art skills such as drawing, painting, and sculpting.

Dave Riller

Dave started working on games in his spare time back in the days of Doom and Quake. His work caught our eye and we lured him here from the East Coast to work on Half-Life.

Eddie Parker

Rogue Canadian masquerading as a software engineer, designer, and whatever else they let me get away with. Please note: Valve Employees will never ask you for personal or account information, on Steam or anywhere else. You can safely ignore anyone who claims to have mistakenly reported you - that will not get you banned. If you need help with your Steam account, go to https://help.steampowered.com/.

Contact View Steam Profile
Greg Cherlin

I do level design, game design, and gameplay programming. At Valve I've worked on Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Portal 2, and Dota 2. Some of my favorite games: Descent, Everquest, StarCraft: Brood War, Slay the Spire, and Valheim.

Ido Magal

Ido joined Valve in 2001. He's older now.

Jake Rodkin

Jake is a level and UI designer and still doesn't quite believe it. He helped make Firewatch, The Walking Dead, Sam & Max, and many old websites lost to time.

Contact
Jeff Lane

Jeff joined Valve in 2000. Previously at Sierra On-line working on multiple titles, lastly Swat 3 CQB. Jeff has been a designer and technical artist on many Valve products including Team Fortress, Half-Life 2, Day of Defeat, Left 4 Dead, Portal 2, Team Fortress 2, and VR titles The Lab and Half-Life: Alyx.

Contact
John Morello

John is an animator most of the time. He’s been a gamer since his parents bought their Commodore 64. As a high-schooler he made small Quake mods and became addicted to Team Fortress. After graduating, his brother introduced him to the guys on the Day of Defeat team. They wanted to ship their mod, but they needed animation help. John jumped in. Valve eventually invited John and the rest of the team to continue DoD development at Valve’s offices. At this point, John has worked on nearly every product we've shipped. His TF obsession is over - replaced by an addiction to DotA, and lapping his Ducati at local road courses.

Karen Prell

Karen performed for 16 years as a puppeteer with Jim Henson and the Muppets before becoming a computer animator. She worked at Pixar and several other animation companies before joining Valve, where she continues to apply her puppet acting experience towards animating an exciting mix of heroes, creatures and robots.

Ken Banks

Before joining Valve in 2010 as a Level Designer and Artist, Ken Banks previously worked on titles including Doom 3, Quake 4, and Borderlands. His career was inspired by his first real gaming experience on the PC, Valve's Half-Life, in 1998. He became established in Half-Life's flourishing mod community as a contributor to the successful Natural-Selection, which helped launch his career into game development at the age of 18.

Kyle Sommer

Kyle likes making and playing games.

Matt Charlesworth

Matt is and Artist and Designer from the UK city of Nottingham. After spending the first 10 years of his career working at studios in the UK and Canada, Matt joined Valve in 2008. He got straight to work crafting character art and for Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, Dota 2 and The Lab and has most recently shipped Half-Life: Alyx.

Matt Logue

As a paint fixer and rotoscope artist at the legendary Tippett Studio, Matthew painted a pimple out of Darryl Hannah's armpit for My Favorite Martian and rotoscoped Kevin Bacon in a black bodysuit for Hollowman. He moved on to legendary Weta Digital to work as an animator and animation lead for The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He came to legendary Valve from Los Angeles where he was the animation supervisor on The Chronicles of Narnia; The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, the longest title of any film he's ever worked on. He's now animating on Dota 2. Matthew had been eyeing Valve for awhile and is happy to report that he and his family like Seattle much better than LA, although the weather reminds him of that Ray Bradbury short story (All Summer in a Day) where the sun only comes out for two hours every seven years.

Mike Belzer

Before Valve, Mike animated for TV, Commercials and Film. Now he's animating at the coolest company on the planet making awesome content for fun games and VR.

Miles Estes

Miles began his career at Foundation Imaging in Southern California as a character animator on the Starship Troopers TV series. Shortly thereafter, he got his start in games - lead animator for Interplay's PS2 game Run Like Hell. Upon joining Valve in 2001, Miles was inhumanely forced to participate in company playtests. As a result, he developed an addiction to Counter-Strike, despite the fact that he was really bad at it. He has since overcome his addiction and contributes character modeling and/or animation to a lot of Valve games. His hobbies include lamenting over the fact that he's not drawing enough.

Contact
Nathan Kinnick

Nathan is a gameplay programmer and a gameplay player.

View Steam Profile
Phil Co

Phil Co has been a level designer since 1996. He joined Valve in 2005 and has worked on The Orange Box, the Left 4 Dead series, Portal 2, Dota 2 and SteamVR. Phil tried filmmaking for the documentary Free to Play and is also the author of the book Level Design for Games.

Contact View Steam Profile
Robin Walker

Robin is Bluey.

Contact
Sahil Dhanju

Sahil is a gameplay programmer from Dallas, Texas. He loved Valve's games so much that he was determined to eventually work on them.

Contact View Steam Profile
Sean Vanaman

Writer and lackluster game developer. Worked on projects such as Firewatch, The Walking Dead and was the inventor of the rotary engine.

Contact View Steam Profile
Simonne Brown

Simonne loved pushing buttons as a child, so she decided to push buttons as a career.

Tristan Reidford

Tristan earned a degree in transportation design. After a dipping a toe into industrial design, he found his way into making models for games, eventually landing at Valve to help with Half Life 2, Episode 2. Since then He's been delighted to get away with building all sorts of models and art for Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Team fortress 2, among others. Outside of Valve, Tristan enjoys the decision paralysis that comes from making art and models in the real world where there is no Ctrl Z.

Contact

## Hardware

Ben Jackson

Ben started his career as a UNIX systems programmer and then accidentally transitioned to embedded systems focused on video delivery. Valve rescued him from the video industry and gave him the opportunity to work on Steam, Steam Controller, and Virtual Reality.

Benoit Collette

Industrial Designer - creating meaningful and successful design solutions by merging and blurring the boundaries of Industrial Design, User Experience, and Interaction Design. Currently working on SteamDeck.

Contact
Gordon Stoll

Gordon is a software/math type who is working on VR hardware. And by "working on VR hardware" I mean calibrating things. Allllll the things. So many things.

Jeff Leinbaugh

Jeff writes software and firmware for all sorts of VR devices.

Jeff Mucha

Hardware engineer working on Steam Deck and SteamVR hardware and technology

Contact
Jeremy Selan

Jeremy is a software developer working on hardware. He loves pixels. Except for the crappy ones. He's excited about the future of VR, concerned about AI, and otherwise an optimist. He formerly had unrealistic expectations for pixels in the visual effects industry, and regularly overcomes zeroth-world problems.

Contact View Steam Profile
Johnny Deng

Electrical Engineer with experience in Signal Integrity and Semiconductor product development, test. I work a lot in the lab.

View Steam Profile
Michael Baseflug

Valve Employees (including myself) are not on Discord or any other platforms asking you for personal or account information. You can't get banned by someone claiming to have mistakenly reported you. Only share information with Steam customer support through the official website https://help.steampowered.com

Contact View Steam Profile
Shreya Liu

Shreya graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign but got working on strategic business partnerships for Surface while at Microsoft. She used to dream about lightsabers but now she's working on making them a [virtual] reality.

Steve Cardinali

Steve is a product design engineer who spent 10 years designing small electronic devices to be as small as they can be (Apple Watches and insulin pumps). Now he's working on larger hardware products for Valve and all the extra space scares him. Somebody give him a box.

View Steam Profile
Tor Krog

I work with our design teams and manufacturing / supplier partners to help herd the chaos of launching new products.

Contact

## Human Resources

Amy Baisch

Unlike most people at Valve, Amy was actually born and raised right here in Washington, on Whidbey Island. And like all native Washingtonians talking to transplants, she will remind you of this fact roughly twice a minute in any given conversation. After many years working at Zillow, Amy took a break from work to enjoy time with her family and learn how to cook some bucket list foods, like Beef Wellington and Lasagna Bolognese from scratch. Years later, sitting in her kitchen surrounded by pans of Beef Wellington, Amy realized it was either time to pick some new foods or get back to work. Since joining Valve Amy has found a second family. She gets the opportunity to work with exceptionally talented and incredibly kind people every day, and to spend every day helping to make their experience at Valve better. When she’s not working, Amy’s favorite passion is to travel. Be sure to ask her about Utila next time you see her!

Elizabeth Ratto

Right before joining Valve in 2010, Elizabeth worked for Gracenote(a Subsidiary of Sony). Elizabeth is a graduate of California State University, Chico (with a concentration in Human Resources). Please note: Valve Employees will never ask you for personal or account information, on Steam or anywhere else. If you need help with your Steam account, go to https://help.steampowered.com/.

## Product Design

Alden Kroll

Alden has a habit of ending up in the middle of everything. If he isn't getting in the way of Steam game releases, he's probably working on UI design for Valve games or the Steam store. Alden came to Valve after working on design and production for the Xbox 360 Dashboard. Before that, he studied design at the University of Washington and worked on various freelance design projects. When he's not working, Alden can be found chasing his competitive ambitions in cycling and swimming. He commutes to work by swimming back and forth across Lake Washington every day. Most weekends, he relaxes by riding his bike to Portland. Twice.

View Steam Profile
Benoit Collette

Industrial Designer - creating meaningful and successful design solutions by merging and blurring the boundaries of Industrial Design, User Experience, and Interaction Design. Currently working on SteamDeck.

Contact
Dhabih Eng

Dhabih's name is pronounced ZA-bee.

Contact
Emily Kent

Emily works on the UI for Steam; library, mobile apps, community, support, sales, and security. Prior to Valve, Emily spent time working at Xbox, a mobile start up, frog, Jackson Fish Market, and Microsoft's Pioneer Studios. Emily wants you to protect your account with the Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator.

Jay Shaw

I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.

Contact
John Ikeda

John has designed eyewear, test and measurement equipment and many gaming products. He has also worked on input products for creatives as well as VR.

Lawrence Yang

UX / Product Design / many other hats, currently working on Steam and Steam Deck.

Contact
Melissa Small

Melissa likes collaborating, reading books, knitting hats, painting pictures, going on long walks, and choosing colors. She gets to do most of those things at Valve.

Contact
Quintin Doroquez

"Q!" brings over 10 years of multi-disciplinary graphic design experience to Valve. He has had a creative role in launching print, online, and new media endeavors as a senior art director for Incite PC Gaming magazine, art director for PC Accelerator, and associate art director for PC Gamer. At Valve, you can find Q!'s schedule filled with marketing, packaging, web design, game trailers, .dem file creation, and other visual communications tasks. In his spare time, Q! likes to reminisce about how he was training to be a competitive bodybuilder 14 years ago. Get over it, already!

Contact
Shawn Zabecki

2017 Valve fantasy football champion. University of Washington VCD graduate. Although he sucks at actually playing video games, he loves working on them.

Contact
Simonne Brown

Simonne loved pushing buttons as a child, so she decided to push buttons as a career.

## Software Engineering

Adil Sardar

Adil is originally from Toronto, Canada and he joined Valve in late 2016. Since then he has built various features that help game developers to communicate with their fans. For examples, he has worked on live streaming, game events, Steam sales and developer home pages on Steam.

Contact View Steam Profile
Al Farnsworth

Originally from the east coast, Al moved to Seattle in 2006 and joined Valve a couple years later in 2008. Since joining, Al has worked on everything Steam - from Steam Chat and Trading, to holiday sales and Tagging on the Steam Store, to Steam Trading Cards and Discussions on the Steam Community.

Contact View Steam Profile
Anish Chandak

Anish joined Valve in 2016 where he is one of the main developers behind Steam Audio. He did his undergraduate in Computer Science from IIT Bombay in 2006 and received his Ph.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2011. Before joining Valve, Anish was the co-founder and CEO of a VR audio tech startup Impulsonic.

Contact
Ben Burbank

Ben is a programmer formerly of Campo Santo, Double Fine, and EA. He cares deeply about helping people tell stories and focuses predominantly on tools, UI, and systems.

Contact
Ben Jackson

Ben started his career as a UNIX systems programmer and then accidentally transitioned to embedded systems focused on video delivery. Valve rescued him from the video industry and gave him the opportunity to work on Steam, Steam Controller, and Virtual Reality.

Brian Jacobson

As a child, Brian learned how to program by cracking all the computer games he couldn't afford to buy. As an adult, he decided to join the games industry as a way to make up for his reprehensible childhood. At LookingGlass, he worked on Flight Unlimited. He went on to co-found GameFX, and was a Lead Engineer on Sinistar Unleashed. He joined Valve in 2000 and has contributed to just about everything the company has shipped since then. Brian focuses mostly on engine and graphics technology, with the occasional foray into game design.

Contact
Charlie Brown

Another Fort Walton Beach, Florida native, Charlie graduated from the University of Florida in the summer of 1994 and headed for California and 3Dfx Interactive. His responsibilities there included developer support, porting products to hardware, sample code, simple demos, and ultimately working with the 3Dfx developer relations team to manage the engineering game porting effort. Charlie left 3Dfx after two years and, with his college friend Gary McTaggart, created the Uber(tm) Engine at Ritual Entertainment in Dallas, Texas. Not long after joining Ritual, Charlie and Gary left to start their own company. Not long after that, Valve made Charlie (and Gary) an offer "they couldn't refuse."

Contact
Chris Carollo

Chris started his career at Looking Glass, working on sound and physics for the Thief Series, and later the sequel to Deus Ex at Ion Storm. Since joining Valve he's worked on chainsaws and jockeys and spell-stealing wizards and machines that make suggestions for Steam and Dota 2.He will never contact you on Discord.

Contact
Chris Kadar

If not at his desk, Chris can probably be found somewhere on the side of the road waiting for a tow truck. If needed, he can be summoned by jingling a bag of Apex seals.

Colby Sieber

Having spent his early years between Georgia, Alabama, and Texas, by the end of college Colby was ready to escape the hot, humid weather of the South and jumped on an opportunity to move to the Seattle area and join Microsoft. Then, in 2018, he scored his dream job as an engineer at Valve and has been enjoying every minute of it.

Contact
Daniel Jennings

Contact
Dave Kircher

Dave joined Valve in 2005 to work on the rendering and physics aspects of portals for the game Portal. Now he spends most of his time doing low level systems work in Source 2.

Contact View Steam Profile
Don Holden

Don has been at Valve since 2009 after earning a couple computer science degrees from Cornell University. He has contributed to Source 2 and numerous projects including The Lab and Half-Life: Alyx, with a focus on computer graphics.

Drew Gottlieb

Drew joined Valve in 2018 to work on all things VR, and later dove head-first into building Steam Deck.Originally from "near Philadelphia", he graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology having worked at Microsoft (Windows) and Google (Tilt Brush, Google Flights). If he manages to peel a VR headset off his face, it's probably because he has an indie concert to attend or an evening of scuba diving in the many waters of wet Seattle.NOTE: Drew does not have a Discord, so he is definitely not reaching out to you on Discord. Nor is any other Valve employee, ever.

Contact
Eddie Parker

Rogue Canadian masquerading as a software engineer, designer, and whatever else they let me get away with. Please note: Valve Employees will never ask you for personal or account information, on Steam or anywhere else. You can safely ignore anyone who claims to have mistakenly reported you - that will not get you banned. If you need help with your Steam account, go to https://help.steampowered.com/.

Contact View Steam Profile
Fletcher Dunn

I'm a generalist programmer who has been making games since 1996. For some reason I wrote 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Games Development. Lately I've been focusing on networking.

Contact
Gordon Stoll

Gordon is a software/math type who is working on VR hardware. And by "working on VR hardware" I mean calibrating things. Allllll the things. So many things.

Jay Stelly

Jay joined Valve from Tetragon where he was lead engineer and 3D engine developer of Virgin's Nanotek Warrior. Before that, he developed titles for Sony Playstation & 3DO. Way before that, he wrote his first computer game (at age 9) and had a game published in a magazine (at age 15). A native of Cajun Country, Jay finds Northwest buildings too hot (what, no air conditioning?) and the food not hot enough.

Contact
Jeff Leinbaugh

Jeff writes software and firmware for all sorts of VR devices.

Jeremy Selan

Jeremy is a software developer working on hardware. He loves pixels. Except for the crappy ones. He's excited about the future of VR, concerned about AI, and otherwise an optimist. He formerly had unrealistic expectations for pixels in the visual effects industry, and regularly overcomes zeroth-world problems.

Contact View Steam Profile
Joe Ludwig

Joe joined Valve as a programmer in 2009 and has spent his time working on item back ends, trading systems, virtual reality, and hats. These days he is helping out with the software side of Valve's hardware effort. Though he started his game industry career at Sierra in 1998, most of the intervening time was spend on trains and pirate ships during his nine years at Flying Lab software. Before that, he was never in Anthrax, no matter what you may have heard on the internet.

Contact
John McCaskey

John spent his post college graduate years at a struggling Web 2.0 startup, lured in by the illusion of stock option riches. Since arriving at Valve, he's landed on the Steam team where he works on a little bit of everything, from Shopping Carts to the in-game Overlay. His favorite thing about Valve is having a huge, energetic user base, which benefits from the work he does on Steam.

John McDonald

John writes high performance code and oversees gradient descents. Prior to joining Valve, he worked at NVIDIA where he developed new techniques to drive GPUs and helped numerous developers optimize their game engines. John got his start in the game industry working on Command & Conquer: Generals.

Contact
John Schoenick

John makes software work maybe more than it did previously, with varying degrees of success. Since joining Valve in 2014, he has focused on improving virtual hats, the Linux gaming ecosystem, and intersections thereof. Prior to Valve, John was last seen making attempts at improving the free and open web at Mozilla.

Contact View Steam Profile
Jon Pile

Jon really really likes writing software, plus doing all the other things you have to do in order to make software useful to humans once you've written it.

Lukasz Gwozdz

Lukasz used to work at Microsoft (Visual Studio, Azure Data Marketplace) and Facebook (Search Indexing/Metrics). His not-so-secret alter ego also spent countless evenings and nights on Steam. After realizing the work time was cutting into his Steam time a bit too much for his liking, the only logical solution was to apply to Valve and streamline the whole work/play situation.

Contact
Martin Otten

Martin started at Valve in 2000 as a contractor working from Germany and moved to Seattle after graduating from Dortmund University with a Master's Degree in Computer Science. After working on HLTV, Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2, he moved to the Steam team and has been involved tons of Steam projects & features ever since. When he's not programming, he's reading about planes, or talking about planes or flying a plane.

View Steam Profile
Matt Rhoten

Software nerd who's a little interested in everything else too.

View Steam Profile
Nathan Nuber

Nathan joined Valve in 2021. He uses a keyboard to tell the computer how to solve problems (some details have been omitted for brevity). Prior to Valve, Nathan worked on virtual reality, input devices, and desktop remoting.

Pierre-Loup Griffais

Born in Paris, Pierre-Loup is a multiclassed systems and graphics programmer with too many opinions on product design. After moving to the US in 2007 to work on graphics drivers, he joined Valve in 2013 to help port Steam and the Source Engine to Linux platforms. Since then, P.L. has helped ship the Steam Controller and the Vulkan graphics API.

Contact View Steam Profile
Sahil Dhanju

Sahil is a gameplay programmer from Dallas, Texas. He loved Valve's games so much that he was determined to eventually work on them.

Contact View Steam Profile
Scott Dalton

Scott began playing and designing games at an early age on an Atari 800 and never looked back. He came to Valve after creating games at Legend Entertainment for many years. Aside from level design and game mechanics, he delights in creating particle effects and programming the system that drives them. When not making worlds come to life, he's usually making them explode, bleed, and burn. He helped to spin up the hardware teams at Valve and currently is working on the Steam Controller.

Sergiy Migdalskiy

A bit of an odd-ball, Sergiy joined Valve to do weird low-level stuff and squeeze more blood, um, juice out of the silicon in your gaming machines. Sergiy specializes in systems programming, physics, and applied math. According to him, some games pretend to be simulating physicsy-looking motion. Sergiy made the physics engine behind Uncharted: Drake's Fortune while at Naughty Dog, and the animation system in Far Cry during his lazy years at Crytek. There were a few other odd jobs here and there, but the list is long and boring, and mostly lost in the eons that have passed.

Taylor Sherman

Taylor joined Valve in 2001 to help develop Steam, and has been part of that team ever since. His previous experience ranges from DVD emulation to air combat simulators for the military. He has a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from The Cooper Union in New York City. In his spare time, Taylor enjoys photography, playing bass and guitar, and staring at maps.

Vitaliy Genkin

Vitaliy grew up in the Soviet Union. He earned two Master's degrees (with honors) and a lieutenant rank. He solved thousands of differential equations systems, then architected and implemented software that has probably processed petabytes of binary data by now. And then, he moved to Santa Monica to help Sony lay the foundation for PlayStation-3. Vitaliy joined Valve in 2006 and helped us ship The Orange Box, our first Xbox 360 game. He went on to establish our matchmaking system, implement the PlayStation-3 version of our engine, and design and improve our numerous back-end systems.

Contact
Yahn Bernier

Yahn was an Atlanta patent lawyer with a degree in chemistry from Harvard. So obviously he ended up in Seattle developing computer games. He taught himself to program at the age of 12 and has worked on the systems code and tools for most of Valve's titles.

Contact

## Technical Infrastructure

John Drury

John joined Valve in 2018 and works on Steam. Before that, he spent over a decade on the east coast designing, implementing, and maintaining large data platforms for the government, finance, and healthcare industries.

## Writing

Jay Pinkerton

Jay Pinkerton is a comedy writer who fell into game writing completely accidentally fifteen years ago and has been waiting for somebody to notice ever since. Prior to joining Valve, Jay ping-ponged around the industry working with very nice people on games that were worked very hard on and then shelved forever. Prior to that he was an editor at the then-resurrected Cracked.com, and helped get that online. Prior to that he was Managing Editor of the National Lampoon. Prior to that he was mostly freelance writing, which is a professional way of saying he starved for a living. Prior to that he was a child, then a baby, and then hadn’t existed yet. That pretty much catches you up.

Jon Blakeley

Jon joined the ranks of Valve in 2011. We got a lot more strict about hiring after that.

Sean Vanaman

Writer and lackluster game developer. Worked on projects such as Firewatch, The Walking Dead and was the inventor of the rotary engine.

Contact View Steam Profile
Steve Jaros

Writer of things. Lover of pro wrestling.

Contact

## Other Experts

Alireza Razmpoosh

Alireza moved to Canada (via Iran and Turkey) when he was nine. His first impressions of the west were the films TRON, Die Hard, and Lawnmower Man. Inspired by this trinity of action, art, and science he chose a career in 3D animation and visual effects. After earning a Bachelor's and a post-graduate degree in animation from Sheridan Institute of Technology, Ali went to London to start work on his first film. He was 24. He now works at Valve where he drives the effort to transform visual effects into a dynamic interactive experience - and blows stuff up.

Andrew Kim

Started with fx in movies now we're here

Augusta Butlin

Augusta has been with Valve since 2007. She works on business development for Steam, VR and events like Steam Dev Days.

David Speyrer

David developed telecommunications software in Boulder, Colorado before he came to Valve. During his time here he's been a programmer/designer and cabal lead on Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode Two. He has also worked quite a lot on our Hammer level editor over the years. A fan of recreational physical suffering, David goes rock climbing in his spare time. He has dragged many a pale and shaking Valve employee along on adventures in vertiginous terror.

Contact
Eric Smith

Eric joined Valve in 2000 after graduating from the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, WA. Before DigiPen, he worked for Nintendo of America. But when DigiPen opened its doors in the U.S. in January 1998, Eric saw an opportunity to change careers and make games instead of just playing them.

Contact
Erik Johnson

Erik began his career as a shoe salesman and moved up to selling used cars. When he decided that the car business wasn't for him either, he took a job in Sierra Online's QA department. As one of Sierra's Half-Life testers, Erik spent a lot of time at Valve and we eventually offered him a job as shipping manager. Erik is now one of Valve's business development authorities.

Contact
Gabe Newell

Gabe held a number of positions in the Systems, Applications, and Advanced Technology divisions during his 13 years at Microsoft. His responsibilities included running program management for the first two releases of Windows, starting the company's multimedia division, and leading efforts on the Information Highway PC. Then he started Valve. His most significant contribution to Half-Life, the company’s debut title, was his statement: "C'mon, people, you can't show the player a really big bomb and not let them blow it up."

Contact
Jason Mitchell

After eight years leading ATI's 3D Application Research Group, Jason was finally seduced by the entertainment industry and joined Valve in 2005. He has worked on a variety of projects, from real-time rendering to Source Filmmaker to the Steam iOS client and, most recently, VR game programming on Half-Life: Alyx. He has even gotten to apply his latent CAD skills by modeling and texturing props for Left 4 Dead 2 and designing puzzles and gameplay spaces for Half-Life: Alyx.

Contact
Kaci Aitchison Boyle

I'm a communications nerd and slightly obsessed with all things communications-related, which some might call PR and Marketing. I prefer to say the longer thing which is that I'm literally always delighted to collaborate on working on communications goals and challenges of any kind by finding interesting and thoughtful ways to connect the messaging with different audiences. (My favorite thing in the world is if someone sends me an entire packet of words and says "can we make this better?" It's like a word puzzle, which is a convenient excuse for me to bring up that I'm also a midlevel (ok fine, low-level) jigsaw puzzle competitor.)Prior to joining Valve, I spent twenty years in live TV and radio, doing everything from anchoring the (often depressing) morning news to interviewing guests and putting together stories in ways that I hoped drew attention in fun and interesting ways to the people and organizations that needed it. Did that include cool things like flying with the National Guard and Blue Angels? Yes! Did it also include washing a cow for the county fair? You betcha. Did I ever read the wrong name in the prompter WHILE INTRODUCING MYSELF anchoring the morning show? Of course not*, that's from a movie. *Lies, I totally did that. I was filling in for someone who was out sick and they forgot to change it in the script and it was 4:30am and I was tired and honestly even typing this out I realize I have no excuse.

Contact
Liam Lavery

Liam showed early promise in his summer job at General Motors making car transmissions. Twice, GM and the UAW awarded him a Certificate of Perfect Attendance. But Liam left the assembly line for the classroom, teaching college and junior high math until a professor named Yau (that would be the Fields Medal-winning Shing-Tung Yau) convinced him to look for other work. Liam's interest in understanding the rules that govern society led him to law school, and then to Seattle's K&L Gates firm where he specialized in technology and business law and worked with a number of game companies, including Valve. Right before joining Valve, Liam served as general counsel of Zillow.com.

Matthew An

Matthew has worked at Valve since 2010 and is currently focused on Localization. He does a little bit of this and a little bit of that here and there.

View Steam Profile
Ronald Hu

Does a little bit of this and that here at Valve.

Sara Charhon

Sara is one of those odd ducks who decided she wanted to be in Human Resources when she was attending college at the University of Washington. She received an internship in HR with BECU, and began working for them full time once she graduated. From there she went on to work for Zillow, and now she is lucky enough to be a part of Valve's Human Resources team.

Contact
Scott Lynch

Before joining Valve, Scott was Senior Vice President at Havas Interactive where he created and managed the Sierra Studios business unit that published Half-Life. During his five years with Sierra, Scott held a number of different positions in business development, acquisitions, finance, investor relations, and product development. Before Sierra, Scott worked in the public accounting industry for Coopers & Lybrand. In both the audit and tax departments, he managed a range of clients, from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. Scott is a graduate of the University of Washington Business School (with a concentration in accounting), and is an inactive Certified Public Accountant in the State of Washington.

Contact
Seán O Sullivan

Systems Engineer who moved from Ireland to Seattle in 2019 to work for Valve. I spend my time working on our dedicated game servers, datacenters, CDNs and with games teams. Spend too much on coffee and AV.

Sharon Wang

They told Sharon that she could be anything, so she decided she would be the resident unicorn princess.